Saturday Extra: Two Messengers

Mercury, the Messenger planet, returns direct tomorrow (late tonight on the West Coast of the United States) after three weeks in retrograde motion. For the next couple of days, don’t be surprised if communications come to a dead halt, traffic is jammed to a standstill, and stores are out of whatever you’re looking for.

This Mercury retrograde period has been curious, and it’s difficult even to pinpoint what it might have brought, as there are so many other planetary energies zinging around over our heads lately that they’re all jumbled together in a big astrological casserole.

Based on my own experience, it does appear that certain issues that have been building for weeks and even months have come to a head, and now we may have a chance to resolve them once and for all as Mercury returns direct and begins to gather speed next week. Communications with authority figures may play a heightened role, with Mercury in Capricorn. Once Mercury enters Aquarius, on February 14, we’ll start hearing more about the collective, individual rights, and grassroots efforts.

Meanwhile, there is another messenger in our neighborhood, Comet Lulin (thanks to Rossa and Tseka for alerting me to its presence). I’m still researching this entity to discover where it is from and what it might be trying to tell us. This will take me some time, as I’m incapacitated by the back injury I sustained the day after the solar eclipse on January 26. The latest is that I may have a herniated disc. So the long hours I used to spend surfing the ‘Net are prohibited for now.

An initial look at this comet’s unusual behavior suggests that chaos and disorder are part of its message. Lulin is literally going against the grain, in an orbit roughly tracking the path of the planets as we see it from Earth, only it is moving backwards. It was closest to the Sun on January 10, which is another clue for the message of comets, but it wasn’t visible with the naked eye at that time. We may get only a brief glimpse of it, as it approaches its closest point to Earth in late February. From that we can conclude that the forces it symbolizes aren’t obvious and need special vision to see. Lulin comes from deep space and apparently has not visited our inner solar system before, so we might conclude that the message is something new, totally outside of our ability to imagine.

Interestingly, this is all in keeping with the chaotic energy of the planets and eclipse cycle, which I’ve been writing about here and on my personal blog, The Pisces Chronicles.

I will have more as I am able to research. If any of you have links and relevant information, I would love for you to drop me a line.

In terms of brightness Magnitude 6 is the brightest you can get. Venus is around -4.7 though I don’t know anything about the scale they use. A bit like the Richter scale for earthquakes, it is probably exponential.

And a really nice image on Nasa’s APOD website. It’s in the archive for 2 Feb 2009 if you don’t see it on the front page.